And where do you go to learn about ANT and SWF/Flash/FDT? (Google?)
After some tinkering all I got was: failed to create task or type fdt.launch.application

This post was very useful: FDT and ANT | A User’s Guide – Part I by Alan Klement.
Watch the videos (I’m not very fond of tutorial videos but in this case; they get the job done).
What I love about the “Video I: Getting Started” is the fact that it builds up from scratch. So watch this video when you want to know about ant-files/xml, how to open the ANT-View, how to open/execute an ANT-file.

The second video (Video II: Compiling a SWF) was what I really was looking for: how to export a SWF. Very nice because it starts from scratch.
And it gave me the answer I was looking for: why didn’t my ANT-file didn’t work (it about 3/4 of the video):
BUILD FAILED
[blabla]\source\a\example\build\build.xml:17: Problem: failed to create task or type fdt.launch.application
Cause: The name is undefined.
Action: Check the spelling.
Action: Check that any custom tasks/types have been declared.
Action: Check that any / declarations have taken place.

Solution is very simple, but if you don’t know, you will hate FDT and really it’s not it fault:
Goto the green “play” button with the brown bag, in the toolbar (one picture says more than a thousand words:)

Select the ANT-file you want to change (I have only one :D), goto to tab “JRE” and change the Runtime JRE to Run in the same JRE as the workspace and your done:

Very useful are the ANT-snippets and ANT-Build-template!Download (created by Alan Klement) and “install” the ANT-template (how-to on this page but here the short version)

What is useful about this file?

Why doesn’t use everybody this in the papertoy scene?

There is no uniform way to show it in a blog post; every browser works different. I haven’t worked with it a lot and there seem to be some problem with fonts embedding (can also be my inexperience). And people are used to .PDF and viewing files in Adobe Reader (or another .PDF viewer). Another “problem” is that WordPress (this blog runs on it) doesn’t recognize a .SVG file as an image (it labels it as a dangerous file!!)

Example

If you don’t see any images, you probably using old browser.
I have tested this in Firefox 3.6 (OSX and XP), Google Chrome (XP) and Internet Explorer (XP)

How to create or change a .SVG file?

There is a Firefox addon: svg-edit. This can be used for creating files but you can’t open them yet (net version will) so you have to open a .SVG file in a text editor (like notepad++) and copy paste it.
There is an awesome project online called Aviary that also has a vector edit web application: Aviary Raven. You first need op press “create” and then it’s possible to import a file (file > import files). You can also use Inkscape (freeware) or Adobe Illustrator ($$$).

How to download?

Use “save as” on a link or “save this page” if you have clicked on the link.
Make sure that the file you want to save, end with the extension .SVG (Firefox save this file as a .XML file for example)

How to open?

How to print?

You can print from Firefox: open the link and print.
Are you used to .PDF files? Save the .SVG files (link) to your hard drive and visite www.fileformat.info and convert .SVG to a .PDF (remember to save the file as .PDF : in my case it change the extension to .HTM)

Should everybody start using SVG files?

Yes and no: yes because they are very small and most of the modern browsers can show the image…. but sadly not in a page/post which makes as difficult to use as .PDF.
And .PDF is what people know… It will probably get bigger if Firefox will treat .SVG files as an image file like Google Chrome and Safari does.

I recently started my own company (eMCeeKay.nl) and I need to make a website for it…. Not really a problem besides that I don’t have any time to create a design.

So I was thinking about a easy way to update this website without spending extra time on that.

Because the main focus of the company is papertoys (urban papertoys), I need design or papertoy related info in my my new website ().

And I came with two ways to update it without extra effort: twitter (I tweet about a lot of stuff but primarily about papertoys) and this the content on this blog (category: urban-papercraft).

I started with the Twitter part.
There are two Twitter AS3 libraries that “speak” to the Twitter API: twitterscript/ and tweetr/.
But after reading the source I concluded that it was a little bit to much: I don’t want to tweet from emceekay.nl or do searches, so that was not the way to go.

Sometimes I open ActionScript files in another editor then FlashDevelop. And in my case this is Notepad++.
Notepad++ has ActionScript syntax highlighting but it seems that it doesn’t detect it.
When I open an AS file it uses the Haskell syntax highlighting, and that is very annoying especially when you open a couple of files and you need to set them one by one to ActionScript.

Before I discovered option 2 /3 /4, I had to work with XML DOM. This was also in the periode I was still programming in the Flash IDE and the XML DOM methode cost me a lot of time: I couldn’t find the correct node, or attribute, etc.

Until I started programming in SE|PY, because it has a XML Reader. The XML Reader could check if my XML was correctly formatted, and I could just point to the node I wanted to use and it gave me the correct node path.
I don’t know when it started (probably for a while, because I started to use different methodes to access XML) but sadly this reader has some errors, which makes it difficult to use.

But why do I care? I needed to use the XML DOM because I didn’t want to add to the kb of a dynamic banner I was building. It was programmed it in Flash IDE and the SE|PY XML Reader didn’t work….

Download:

In the zip is also a readme.txt with more info about XML Reader.
Doubts? Test drive it here!
Let me know what you think of it, what’s wrong with it, what could improve, bugs, etc

Description XML Reader

XML Reader is a Flash window panel where you can load XML files into.
This is useful in situations when you are writing an XML parser, and need to view the XML your parsing, but don’t feel like toggling back and forth between Flash and another program.
As a Flash panel, you can simply dock it inside of Flash with your other panels, and have it always available while you code in the Flash IDE.

This XML Reader does more: it has color syntax highlighting, indentation and XML DOM(*) to access and manipulate XML Documents WYSIWYG style.

View XML Reader

Because the open XML button only works in Flash a example XML is loaded.
It seems that you are not able to read the content that suppose to be here: itâ€™s called iframes. I would suggest to get a browser that does:Firefox 2.0

Thanx to:

This project is based upon some work of other developers:

The XMLHighlighter class developed by R.Arul Kumaran (at the moment of writing this post I couldn’t visit his site).
This class is used for highlighting the XML file and my modification makes it possible to ‘trace’ the XML-nodes.

The XML reader from SE|PY by Alessandro Crugnola.
This is my free code editor when I’m not using the Flash IDE editor. And the only (as far as I know) wysiwyg XML Reader. Sadly this reader has some errors, which makes it difficult to use. So to fix this, I wrote this panel.

Licensing

This is a little tool I build with the help of Screenweaver.
A dir(ectory) 2 XML tool.

I was looking for a program that could create an XML file from a directory. I found some programs that could help me with this (commandline, Printfolder, Dirhtml) but none of them creates an XML at once. So one evening I sat down, and made this in a couple of hours.

Because this is a custom solution to a specific problem, not everybody will be able to use this. I'm open to suggestions though, so drop me a line.

Dir2xml v1.0

PC and Apple

Sadly enough Screenweaver can't export to Apple (yet).
So Dir2xml will (for now) only work on a pc.